Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts

Bed of Roses is the second book in the Bride Quartet by Nora Roberts. For someone who isn't sure I ever want to get married, I sure love weddings. I love reading wedding magazines, attending weddings, hearing about weddings of people I don't even know, etc. I'm just not sure I can ever imagine having one myself.

That said, obviously I enjoyed this book in the same way I enjoy reading about people who can cook really great things - it's something I love to hear about and something I appreciate, but just not something I am sure I can imagine myself doing someday (I just thought about explaining the cooking thing by saying "I don't like to touch meat" but then I knew that would lead this post down a different route).

But I digress. Not sure if I explained this when I wrote about Vision in White, but the quartet is about a group of friends (4 friends, imagine that) who run a wedding planning business. They each handle separate parts of the business (One does flowers, one does photography, one does catering, and one is the business manager), and the quartet is about their lives as they run the business together.

The thing that irritated me about Bed of Roses is that Roberts tried too hard to hit the reader over the head with the fact that this is the 2nd book in a series. I'm not sure if she set out to write the series, or if she only decided upon the series idea based upon the success of Vision in White (do I seriously read these books?), but Vision in White was a much more stand-alone novel/story than Bed of Roses. In this story, she left loose ends that obligate you to read the next two books in the series (yet to be published). Will I do it? Yeah, probably. Will it still annoy me? Possibly. And it's all a little bit too neat. Four friends, who run a wedding planning business, all of whom fall in love and get married within the span of a few years? Unlikely. Granted I'm not sure if that's how the other two books will turn out. If it isn't, I'll respect Roberts more. I hate reading books and knowing what's going to happen 10 pages before it does - or entire novels before it does, in this case.

Don't worry, I'm not writing this to tell you what a smart person I am - but rather to emphasize just how transparent Roberts' writing is. Meh. I guess that's what you get when you read a series of books that are essentially wedding planning porn.